MAYAYA R I S I N G Mayaya Rising

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Black Female Icons in Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Culture

DAWN DUKE

252 pp 6.125 x 9.25

978-1-68448-438-6 paper $39.95S

978-1-68448-439-3 cloth $130.00SU

January 2023

Literary Studies

Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Women’s Studies • Global Black Studies

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Fundamentals of Glory

Part One: A Cuban/Dominican Case Study

Chapter One: Teodora and Micaela Ginés: Myth or History?

Chapter Two: The Invention of History Through Poetry: A Dominican Initiative

Part Two: A Nicaraguan Case Study

Chapter Three: Tracing the Dance Steps of a “British”

Subject: Miss Lizzie’s palo de mayo

Chapter Four: From “Mayaya Las Im Key” to Creole Women’s Writings

Part Three: A Colombian Case Study

Chapter Five: Rituals of alegría and ponchera: The Enterprising Palenqueras

Chapter Six: Palenquera Writings: A Twenty-First Century Movement

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index

Black Female Icons in Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Culture

Who are the Black heroines of Latin America and the Caribbean? Where do we turn for models of transcendence among women of African ancestry in the region? In answer to the historical dearth of such exemplars, Mayaya Rising explores and celebrates the work of writers who intentionally center powerful female cultural archetypes. In this inventive analysis, Duke proposes three case studies and a corresponding womanist methodology through which to study and rediscover these figures. The musical CubanDominican sisters and former slaves Teodora and Micaela Ginés inspired Aida Cartagena Portalatin’s epic poem Yania tierra; the Nicaraguan matriarch of the May Pole, “Miss Lizzie,” figures prominently in four anthologies from the country’s Bluefields region; and the iconic palenqueras of Cartagena, Columbia are magnified in the work of poets María Teresa Ramírez Neiva and Mirian Díaz Pérez. In elevating these figures and foregrounding these works, Duke restores and repairs the scholarly record.

DAWN DUKE is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese and chair of Portuguese at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Literary Passion, Ideological Commitment: Toward a Legacy of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian Women Writers (Bucknell University Press), editor of A Escritora Afro-Brasileira: Ativismo e Arte Literária, and coeditor of Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film. She has published more than twenty-two articles and chapters.